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Somewhere in Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, a team of eggheads secretly plotted to make you happy or sad by posting uplifting or depressing content on your news feed.

In other words, a publicly traded corporation that makes money by showing you ads tried to toy with your feelings.

Based on all the outrage about Facebook's latest emotional experiment, it seems people have forgotten how the company actually operates.

If the existence of the study, published in an obscure academic journal in 2013, somehow surprises you, then you must really get offline more often. Facebook's core business, after all, is all about manipulating users, whether it's through personalized ads or those ubiquitous emoticons.

"Users should understand that Facebook is not the Internet," said Adi Kamdar, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "It is not a neutral platform. Facebook is a for-profit company with its own needs and agenda."

And that agenda is no different from the rest of the information thrown our way each day via television commercials, banner ads or sponsored Tweets: to provoke an emotional response.

This isn't the first time Facebook provoked outrage over privacy concerns. Privacy advocates opine that the company should have more openly informed consumers they were going to be treated like lab rats.

First off, that kind of defeats the point of the experiment. And even if Facebook did disclose it, how many of us actually read those disclosures?

Perhaps Facebook's news feed experiment has touched an especially sensitive nerve because people like the idea of free will. That we and we alone control our thoughts and emotions. Manipulating feelings as part of a mass social experiment sounds downright creepy and possibly un-American.

"Privacy is about control," Kamdar said. "It's not about being left alone."

And if the cost is free, all bets are off. Facebook experiments are the price we pay for the ability to post videos of cute cats on the world's most popular social network without a fee. Or to not be charged for repeatedly telling our friends that the series finale of "How I Met Your Mother" really sucked. (Clearly, no emotions involved here).

"I always tell clients that a free service is not free," said Joshua Carlson, a privacy attorney based in Minneapolis. "There's always a cost."

I tend to ask privacy experts the same question: If consumers don't like Facebook's purportedly nefarious activities, why don't they just drop the social network?

"That's not as easy as it sounds," Kamdar said.

"You're kind of hooked on it," Carlson said. "Facebook is an addiction."

Ironic. People complain that in manipulating our emotions, Facebook deprives us of the freedom to feel what we want to feel. But yet so many of us remain unable to exercise the ultimate act of free will: cutting ties with Facebook altogether.